Very soon, 40 million Official Trump meme coins will be unlocked, and they are very likely to be sold into the market as quickly as possible — which is bad news for anyone who buys

The launch of the meme coin on the Friday before inauguration day caused a groundswell of retail enthusiasm

The former president's namesake meme coin is set for a rocky patch as 40 million tokens become sellable.

Very soon, 40 million (of the 100 million total supply) Official Trump (ticker: TRUMP) meme coins will be unlocked and they are very likely to be sold into the market as quickly as possible — which is bad news for anyone who buys.

The launch of the meme coin on the Friday before inauguration day caused a groundswell of retail enthusiasm, but one that really only benefited savvy traders and cost many other early buyers a collective $2 billion.

The new tokens are set to become available to sell or transfer three months after the initial January 17 launch, according to Alex Fatuliaj, a co-founder of Simplicity Group, a firm that helps crypto startups sort out how to allocate tokens and when (also known as "tokenomics").

This would make the unlock date April 17, though the exact date is open to interpretation.

State of play: The meme coin, which is named after the former president but does not appear to be directly related to him, currently trades around $8 on cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

Between the lines: Fatuliaj believes these tokens are almost certainly going to be sold.

"My gut feeling is that they will get dumped. There's a good chance we'll see a large sell order that quickly tanks the price to $7 or even $6," he said.

The thinking here is that the token price will be quickly driven down by a big sell order, especially since there are few buyers at lower prices and lots of sellers. But once the price drops enough, there will be more buyers and the price will stabilize at a lower level.

By the numbers: The Official Trump price has trended down since its January launch, and is now down nearly 90% from its brief all-time high of $73.43. At the beginning of February, the token was selling for $23.31. Over the last two weeks, the price has dropped another 20%.

What we're watching: We're also keeping an eye out for the Fight Fight Fight, LLC, the Trump Organization subsidiary responsible for the meme coin, to offer services or benefits to drive value to the token. But so far, we haven't seen any evidence of that.